Please note: we have been online over ten years, and we want The Trek BBS to continue as a free site. But if you block our ads we are at risk.Please consider unblocking ads for this site - every ad you view counts and helps us pay for the bandwidth that you are using. Thank you for your understanding.

Welcome! The Trek BBS is the number one place to chat about Star Trek with like-minded fans. Please login to see our full range of forums as well as the ability to send and receive private messages, track your favourite topics and of course join in the discussions.

If you are a new visitor, join us for free. If you are an existing member please login below. Note: for members who joined under our old messageboard system, please login with your display name not your login name.

Funny, because JJ's universe is already an alternate timeline (or an alternate universe altogether, depending on who you listen to), so we now have at least four universes.

The Prime universe
The Mirror Mirror universe
The Abramsverse
The Abrams Mirror verse

Not to mention the countless universes we've seen in other episodes, notably Parallels in TNG. Perhaps in one Mirror universe, the Klingon/Cardassian alliance has cloaking devices (Crossover), and in another, they do not (The Emperors New Cloak)

__________________
It's a FAAAAKKKEEE!
Senator Vreenak- In the Pale Moonlight

I just caught up on issues 14 to 20. The character one-offs were well written and very touching. They were some of the best comics book issues I've read. "Mirrored" was good too, but I wasn't too keen on the good Spock Prime somehow ending up back in the mirror universe. Might have been better if Goatee Spock Prime made that trip. I also had doubts that Kirk would succeed in destroying Vulcan. That would have been a big enough stain to tarnish Good Kirk, so I'm not surprised that it didn't happen.

I saw some discussion upthread about Christine Chapel. I haven't seen the entire run of the original series in about two decades, but I seem to remember her being a major supporting character along with Sulu, Chekov and Uhura. Maybe I'm mistaken and she wasn't, but that's what I remember. I always wondered why she wasn't part of a "big 8". As for her not being included in the comics or the reboot, I figured it was because they may want to include her in a future movie.

I saw some discussion upthread about Christine Chapel. I haven't seen the entire run of the original series in about two decades, but I seem to remember her being a major supporting character along with Sulu, Chekov and Uhura. Maybe I'm mistaken and she wasn't, but that's what I remember.

According to IMDB, she was in 25 episodes [8.3 per season]; Sulu/Chekov/Uhura were in 51 [17 per season]/36 [18 per season]/68 [22.67 per season] respectively.

So while she was recurring, the others all appeared on the show more than twice as frequently as she did.

I saw some discussion upthread about Christine Chapel. I haven't seen the entire run of the original series in about two decades, but I seem to remember her being a major supporting character along with Sulu, Chekov and Uhura. Maybe I'm mistaken and she wasn't, but that's what I remember.

She was a bit more secondary. She made 25 appearances in TOS, versus 35 for Chekov, 51 for Sulu, 64 for Scott, 65 for Uhura, etc. Even if you throw in the 9 animated episodes she was in, she still comes in last among the recurring characters (well, second-last if you count Rand).

Still, I suppose it's the movies that solidified a lot of the public perceptions about the characters and their prominence. There's no reason the movies couldn't have given Chapel a significant ongoing role, but after TMP, they didn't. Really, once she became a doctor, having both her and McCoy would've been a bit redundant.

Mr. Laser Beam wrote:

Everyone knows about Section 31 now, so whoever succeeds Admiral Marcus as head of Starfleet will be motivated to prove he (or she) is not one of them.

Do we know that? We know that Kirk knows about them. I'm sure he reported what Marcus told him about them, that there were investigations in the wake of the Vengeance crash, and hopefully the organization was exposed and dismantled by the final scene of the movie a year later. But there was never actually a line in the movie confirming that S31's existence had become common knowledge. Maybe it depends on how good they are at hiding and concealing evidence. Although I'm skeptical of stories about conspiracies that are unbeatable and impossible to unearth; in reality, unless one lives in a totalitarian state, secrets aren't that easy to keep once people start looking.

Majel Barrett's billing in ST:TMP secured her place as a member of "the big eight", and she was scheduled to be written into ST II (in fact, her white TMP scrubs were adapted to match the changes made to McCoy's white scrubs for ST II and her nametag was already on them, in anticipation), but she decided to release a press statement to all the fan clubs that the Roddenberrys had corresponded with since the early 70s, stating that due to Gene being relegated to the rather toothless position of "Executive Consultant" on ST II (he got to comment on every script, contractually, but no one had to act on his opinions), she was refusing to participate as Chapel.

I saw some discussion upthread about Christine Chapel. I haven't seen the entire run of the original series in about two decades, but I seem to remember her being a major supporting character along with Sulu, Chekov and Uhura. Maybe I'm mistaken and she wasn't, but that's what I remember.

She was a bit more secondary. She made 25 appearances in TOS, versus 35 for Chekov, 51 for Sulu, 64 for Scott, 65 for Uhura, etc. Even if you throw in the 9 animated episodes she was in, she still comes in last among the recurring characters (well, second-last if you count Rand).

Still, I suppose it's the movies that solidified a lot of the public perceptions about the characters and their prominence. There's no reason the movies couldn't have given Chapel a significant ongoing role, but after TMP, they didn't. Really, once she became a doctor, having both her and McCoy would've been a bit redundant.

I agree - Chapel was a major recurring character but she was the most minor of the major characters, with the exception of her two guest star appearances in the first half of season one and a couple of other slightly meatier appearances such as the infamous episode with the inter-racial kiss. She was sort of demoted even further because of what happened later in the movie franchise.

The character suffered from being McCoy's assistant in sick bay, despite being a qualified biologist. The mistake was limiting her to a medical role instead of letting her utilise her established skills set i.e. McCoy and even Spock were portrayed as taking the lead in any bio-research episodes and Chapel was very passive, rarely taking any kind of lead herself.

In the reboot, they could have established her as an exobiologist, paeleobiologist, or bio-researcher but they stuck with the name-drop of 'Nurse Chapel' instead, limiting her options from the get-go, and then transferred her off the ship off camera! Most people don't care but I thought it was terribly disrespectful to Majel's memory, to the contribution of the character, and to the female dynamic overall, which was extremely male-dominated even before they wrote out one of the few recurring women.

I thought they were ignoring her in the comics because they did not want to reveal the likeness of the actress who would be playing her in the sequel but that proved to be totally wrong. I'm now hoping that they sent her off to the rim because they intend to feature the character in the comics in an episode where her path crosses the Enterprise's again but I may be hoping in vain once more!

Everyone knows about Section 31 now, so whoever succeeds Admiral Marcus as head of Starfleet will be motivated to prove he (or she) is not one of them.

Do we know that? We know that Kirk knows about them. I'm sure he reported what Marcus told him about them, that there were investigations in the wake of the Vengeance crash, and hopefully the organization was exposed and dismantled by the final scene of the movie a year later. But there was never actually a line in the movie confirming that S31's existence had become common knowledge.

I'm sure Kirk would be listened to, after all of this went down. What with all of the damage to San Francisco and London, and the resurgence of Khan, Starfleet is going to be motivated to hunt down and punish the people responsible. I assume that the reason Marcus blabbed about Section 31 was that he wasn't expecting Kirk to survive...so I think Kirk's whistleblowing will prove fruitful. Even if existing S31 members attempt to cover their tracks, I don't think it will work. I envision all of them (however many there are) being charged with high treason.

__________________
"But here you are, in the ninth
Two men out and three men on
Nowhere to look but inside
Where we all respond to PRESSURE!" - Billy Joel

Everyone knows about Section 31 now, so whoever succeeds Admiral Marcus as head of Starfleet will be motivated to prove he (or she) is not one of them.

Do we know that? We know that Kirk knows about them. I'm sure he reported what Marcus told him about them, that there were investigations in the wake of the Vengeance crash, and hopefully the organization was exposed and dismantled by the final scene of the movie a year later. But there was never actually a line in the movie confirming that S31's existence had become common knowledge.

I'm sure Kirk would be listened to, after all of this went down. What with all of the damage to San Francisco and London, and the resurgence of Khan, Starfleet is going to be motivated to hunt down and punish the people responsible. I assume that the reason Marcus blabbed about Section 31 was that he wasn't expecting Kirk to survive...so I think Kirk's whistleblowing will prove fruitful. Even if existing S31 members attempt to cover their tracks, I don't think it will work. I envision all of them (however many there are) being charged with high treason.

I just hope the Federation is competent enough to pull off an Operation Paperclip, because I can just see them sentencing all the people with valuable knowledge (engineers, technicians, strategists, etc...) to ridiculous prison terms and then getting blackballed into releasing all of them when the Klingons inevitably come. I can also see the Federation going "See, gene enhancement is bad!" instead of "See, we should have our own guys genetically enhanced to counter this and other threats."

Then again, the Federation Council has a great incentive to look the other way since Section 31 did get some pretty great results from having Khan give his input on weapons designs and what not. And there's also the fact that all of the deaths in San Francisco are Kirk's fault, since he didn't kill Khan when he had the chance, thereby allowing a mass murderer to slam the Vengeance into the city (there's an Unintended Aesop here). I can totally see Starfleet and the Council wanting to cover up the fact that gross incompetence was responsible for such a huge tragedy.

If anything, Kirk getting the five year mission is good way to keep him ruining everything. Just tell him "yeah, it's totally fine if you violate the Prime Directive to save primitives, just don't start a war with anybody while we fix everything you broke" and everything will work out.

And there's also the fact that all of the deaths in San Francisco are Kirk's fault, since he didn't kill Khan when he had the chance, thereby allowing a mass murderer to slam the Vengeance into the city (there's an Unintended Aesop here).

That's a bizarre argument. Kirk had no advance knowledge that Khan intended to do anything of the sort -- because Khan didn't. The kamikaze run was not part of Khan's plan; it was just the only move left to him once the ship was crippled and his plan to recover his people had failed. The Vengeance was already falling toward Earth, and all he could do was try to aim it at his enemies. There's no possible way Kirk could've anticipated something that even Khan had no idea was going to happen.

Indeed, Kirk did know that Khan was potentially a threat and he did make a reasonable effort to restrain Khan by stunning him, but he underestimated Khan's resilience. Spock then beamed him and the others back and used the torpedoes to disable the Vengeance. As far as Kirk knew at that point, the threat was ended, and he had other priorities like keeping his ship from crashing (something that happened partly because of Marcus's sabotage, I believe), something he gave his life to prevent. Even if he had known that Khan still had enough control of the Vengeance to put it on a collision course for San Francisco, he would've had no ability or opportunity to prevent it.

So it's completely nonsensical and factually wrong to blame Kirk for what happened. It was Khan who bears the primary culpability since it was his decision to commit the act; and Marcus bears secondary responsibility for driving Khan to that extreme, giving him the means to do so with the Vengeance, and crippling the Enterprise's ability to counter it.